Tools / Field journal
Field journal
A log for every night you go out looking, whether it's a stakeout, a hike or a night of skywatching, and yes, that includes the ones where nothing happened. It fills in the weather and the moon for you, and everything stays on your phone or computer. We never see it.
Your journal
- Nights out
- 0
- Hours
- 0
- Heard something
- 0
- Sightings
- 0
Nothing logged yet on this device. Your first entry shows up here.
Why write down the nights where nothing happened?
Here's the thing. If you only write down the nights something weird happened, your notes are going to make it look like something weird happens every time you go out. It doesn't. Most nights you sit in the dark, feed the mosquitoes and drive home.
Those empty nights are what make the good ones mean anything. Say you've been out to the same lake 30 times and you heard knocks twice. That's a very different story than "I heard knocks at the lake" and anybody you tell is going to take you a lot more seriously if you can show them the other 28 nights too.
It helps you as well. After a season of logging you can actually see when things happened (what time, what the moon was doing, what the weather was like) instead of going on memory, and memory is pretty bad at that stuff. Quick, what was the cloud cover three Saturdays ago? Exactly.
Side note: this works the same way for skywatchers. A light you can't explain on a clear, moonless night counts for a lot more when you've got a pile of nights at the same spot where all you saw was planes and Starlink.
What to write down
- The date, when you got there and how long you stayed
- Where you were, close enough that you could find the spot again
- The weather (cloud, wind, temperature, rain). The journal fills this in when you have a signal
- The moon. The journal works that one out for you too
- How many people were with you, and whether anyone had a dog along
- What you went out for
- Anything you heard, saw or smelled, even if it was probably a deer
- Anything that could explain it: planes, campfires, traffic, a train, other people in the bush
- How good the conditions were for spotting anything at all
Write it the same night if you can. By the next morning a ten-second noise has a way of turning into a minute.
Your journal stays on your device
Everything you log here is saved in your browser on this phone or computer. Nothing gets sent to us and there's no account to make. The only thing that ever leaves your device is a weather lookup, and that's just the rough spot (rounded to about 1 km) and the date going to Open-Meteo, a free weather service. If you type a place that isn't in our town list, the name you typed goes to Open-Meteo's place search too, so it can find the spot. Your notes never do. The moon phase is worked out right on your device.
The flip side is that if you clear your browser data or lose your phone, the journal goes with it. Hit Export JSON now and then and keep the file somewhere safe. You can bring it back (or move it to another device) with Import JSON. The CSV opens in any spreadsheet.
If a night does turn into something, tap Turn this into a report on that entry and the report form opens with the place already filled in. A moderator reads every report before it goes on the map. Want to know whether that bright light was just Venus? Try Was it a planet? first.